Myths and realities about KIPP is an excellent column in The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog. It’s written by Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. Here’s an excerpt:

The big difference between KIPP and regular public schools, however, is that whereas struggling students come and go at regular schools, at KIPP, student leave but very few new children enter. Having few new entering students is an enormous advantage not only because low-scoring transfer students are kept out but also because in the later grades, KIPP students are surrounded only by successful peers who are the most committed to the program.

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Is this really the list of the best posts analyzing charter schools, or just a list of the best posts that provide an analytical opposition to charter schools? Is the purpose of this list to encourage enlightened and thoughtful debate or is it to marshall forces against something that could become a threat to the current public school system/teachers’ unions?

As in any large and wide-ranging debate, there is some truth on both sides. When people fail to admit that the other side may have some validity, we reach stagnation and then the winner will be whoever has power – and they will likely write the loser out of the decision making process.

I believe that these posts accurately describe many of the positive aspects of charters, which I, too, believe they offer. At the same time, they describe the limitations of charters, and how they are often being used by others as a tool to attack non-charter public school education.

In fact, I believe that most of these posts give far more credit to charters than many charter advocates, such as the “Waiting For Superman” movie, offer to non-charters.

That being said, however, I’d invite you to share links to a few articles in the comments section that you believe provide a different perspective.

Recently had this link shared with myself and Diane Ravitch by @stuartbuck1 on Twitter. It is a study on KIPP schools from Mathematica Policy Research that is a thorough going analysis that directly addresses some of the common hot spots on the topic of KIPP. It is the most rigorous and thorough analysis of the data I have found. Here is the link: http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/pdfs/education/KIPP_middle_schools_wp.pdf

In addition the quality of charter schools very greatly. Here are two recent studies on the Boston charter school scene that focus the debate not on “charters” as a whole, but where they may be working: one from the Boston Foundation: http://t.co/CuVQWPgM and one from the National Bureau of Economic Research http://t.co/PjFk1mtH.

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